A radical new way to create film

A film with no editors or directors is the idea behind Lifemirror which opens up a new kind of film making to anyone with a mobile phone.

This crowdsourced video project allows people to post their clips into a virtual cinema.

Users can create film titles on the Life Mirror website and contribute to each others' ideas via a mobile phone app for both Android and Apple users.

Each contribution earns so many seconds of 'Screentime' which can be used to start fresh projects.

Lifemirror has been developed by PhD student Oliver Case from the School of Computing and Communications as part of the £1.9m EPSRC Catalyst project at Lancaster University led by Professor Jon Whittle. He was supported by both the EPRSC "Telling Tales" and the HighWire Doctoral Training Centre.

Oliver Case said: "The challenge was to create an online crowd sourced film making system to provide a new form of citizen communication and engagement.

"I call them "living films" because they are an organic reflection of ideas and thoughts. There is no editor and no director and the clips can't be manipulated in any way so it's as far from Hollywood as you can get."

Lifemirror is now at an experimental stage where clips are looped in time sequence under the film title. Eventually, there are plans to group film titles by location so a film on the theme of "Love" shot in Paris will look very different from one shot in London.

Dozens of collectively produced films are in production on community issues, imaginary stories, political debate and activism.

Oliver said: "This has immense potential, not only for community engagement but for documenting events and giving a new perspective on life."

School of Computing and Communications computer scientists are at the forefront of a UK-wide BBC initiative launched on March 12th to inspire a new generation to get creative with coding, programming and digital technology.

Professor Roger Jones has replaced Professor Peter Ratoff as Head of the Physics Department. Roger gained a PhD studying neutrino interactions at CERN and Fermilab before starting his career at CERN working at the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) Collider.

As part of British Science week, 170 students from 14 schools across the region came to Lancaster University on Wednesday 18th March to compete in science, technology, engineering and mathematics challenges.